All the young dudes show you can't put a price on cool

Opening of hip US store provoking hysteria as American dream gets a little bit closer for mesmerised Irish teens

THE HUMBLE blue jean, eh? Who would have thought it could have got so complicated? I blame the Irish teenager.

Hollister, a cheaper (thank God) branch of Abercrombie & Fitch, is due to open in the Dundrum Shopping Centre on July 15th: “The same day as Harry Potter!” as one enthusiastic poster on the Hollister Dundrum website put it. Actually, they’re all enthusiastic. In contrast to this infectious enthusiasm, Patrick Robinson, chief designer of what was once the hoodie mecca, Gap, has been fired. Thrown out on the street in his 100 per cent cotton onesie. It’s a retailer’s nightmare. It’s a shopper’s dream, though.

How many shapeless, semi-transparent and beige “dresses” can one hemisphere consume? Not enough at the moment, according to the bosses of Gap.

How many cardigans in dun brown can one country wedge onto its rails? Too many, is the answer.

And yet we never had the best of Gap. All the good stuff that was praised in the fashion magazines – the men’s cashmere sweaters which chic women were reported to be wearing last winter, to give just one embittered example – were not available here.

"They are carried only in the bigger stores," a nice salesman told The Irish Timeslast winter. Even though he was standing in the echoing vastness of the Dundrum Gap store at the time. We were also deemed too provincial to receive Gap's pretty Liberty-print shirts. But then leisure dressing can be pretty difficult for grown-ups; most of us should not wear jeans at all.

Look at the firms dedicated to making unbelievably expensive jeans, woven from gossamer wings in an effort to make them a tad more comfortable on the adult frame . Gap has been selling the preppy leisure wear of the east coast of America to people over 40 for decades. No wonder Patrick Robinson ran out of road.

On the other hand, even Morgan Kelly would have to admit that this country, at least, is rich in teenagers. Teenagers grow and teenagers spend. They must be the most highly motivated shoppers of all. About fashion they are admirably ruthless. The last thing an Irish teenager wants to look like is an Irish teenager. We cannot blame them for this, as the last thing an Irish adult wants to look like is an Irish adult. As a nation we pay a fortune to people who will help us to look foreign and that doesn’t just mean the companies who sell us fake tan.

Last Wednesday this newspaper reported Hollister were thought to be paying a rent in Dundrum Shopping Centre of €750,000, plus 10 per cent of its turnover. That’s an awful lot of someone else’s pocket money.

As Gap’s star plummeted so Abercrombie’s soared. Their pornographic carrier bags, which featured pictures of thin young people naked, punctuated the boom. You’d stumble on them in broom cupboards (don’t ask) and at the bottom of adult wardrobes. Like so much that we bought then, the Abercrombie Fitch carrier bags were too conspicuous for everyday use, yet too exotic to throw away.

Whilst on their shopping trips to New York dutiful Irish mummies had given up good drinking time in order to toil their way to the Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store, which is situated, I believe, on 5th Avenue. Most other adults went there to lust after Abercrombie & Fitch’s famously nubile staff. The T-shirts were just an excuse. There were queues.

It would be foolish to pretend that I understand the appeal of Abercrombie & Fitch. Or that I understand why our teenagers loved wearing their T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms, accessorised only with a full face of slap ( that is, make-up, usually by Mac ) and a string of pearls. Yet, mad and all as it was, they did. Do you think that it was that teen drama the OC which turned our fine young people American? Or just a communal childhood of watching one American television series after another?

The Hollister’s college-kid look has been well summarised as “numbers and college names plastered on things.” Although this could be said about a lot of Gap stock too. Hollister is based in California – or so they say. “Hollister is the original Southern California lifestyle brand, laid back and effortlessly cool,” according to its own publicity. On the website males are “Dudes” and females are “Bettys” but I would still say the most troubling thing about Hollister is their prices.

Although there is a store in Belfast, the sterling exchange rate means most of these garments are acquired over the internet. So it is really no surprise the cream of Irish youth wants to work at Hollister’s, bless their hearts. There are lively exchanges on the web at the moment about who actually deserves to work at the new store in Dundrum.

Meanwhile, presumably, the Hollister’s executives spend their days rubbing their hands in glee. (That’s glee, not Glee). Abercrombie & Fitch has postponed the opening of its store on College Green, partly in order to see how the Hollister store does. In a country that has never seen a West Coast dream it didn’t like, the rest of us are pretty confident that it will do rather well.